A couple years ago, Google came under considerable fire for its Street View product, where the online services giant photographed homes and other buildings in numerous countries as part of its online mapping service, as individuals said the photos invaded their privacy. Then, last year, Google announced that, for more than three years — in more than 30 [...]
Feds, RIAA Ask ,500 in Damages Per Song: Via Wired: Threat Level. Do federal judges have the power to reduce jury awards in copyright-infringement cases? The Obama administration and the Recording Industry Association of America don’t think so. They argued that point Monday before a three-judge panel of the 1st U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals [...]
Last week I did an interview on a San Diego news program about issues with many cameras and smart phones in particular embedding very accurate location information in your pictures. If your camera (smart phone or whatever) has GPS, then the EXIF meta data in the picture will contain your location to within about 20 [...]
The International Business Times has a column about the privacy of data on mobile devices such as cellphones: This is nothing to do with recording your conversations. This is about the information on your phone: contacts, emails, calendars and so on. The police usually need a warrant to search property. For that, they have to [...]
Wired reports on the likely addition of mandatory black boxes to autos and how the data collection could affect individual privacy: Next month, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration is expected to declare that all vehicles must contain an event data recorder, known more commonly as a “black box.” The device, similar to those found [...]
The Los Angeles Times reports on a data breach that affects employees of the federal Securities and Exchange Commission. About 4,000 agency employees, including several in Los Angeles, have been notified that their Social Security numbers and other payroll information were included in an unencrypted email, according to Drew Malcomb, a Department of Interior spokesman. [...]
The Washington Post looks at a privacy fight in California: Web giants Facebook, Google, Twitter and Skype have banded together to oppose an online social networking privacy bill in California that would require users’ permission to display personal information such as home addresses and phone numbers. The bill, introduced last February by state Senate Majority [...]
Justice Dept. to Congress: Don’t Saddle 4th Amendment on Us: Via Wired: Threat Level. The Obama administration is urging Congress not to adopt legislation that would impose constitutional safeguards on Americans’ e-mail stored in the cloud. As the law stands now, the authorities may obtain cloud e-mail without a warrant if it is older than [...]
In the wake of a groundbreaking series of public consultations on the privacy impacts of new technologies and business practices, the Privacy Commissioner of Canada has concluded that organizations who track the online activities of Canadians must be more up front about their practices. The final report on the consultations, launched at the IAPP Canada [...]
Appeals Court Strengthens Warrantless Searches at Border: Via Wired: Threat Level. The authorities may seize laptops, cameras and other digital devices at the U.S. border without a warrant, and scour through them for days hundreds of miles away, a federal appeals court ruled. The 2-1 decision (.pdf) Wednesday by the 9th U.S. Circuit Court of [...]